Tag Archives: Office 365

Official training material for SharePoint 2010 updated for 2012: Includes Office 365

Developer, IT Pro, SharePoint, , ,

learnMicrosoft is currently updating their existing IT Pro-targeted certification training material. The current version was released shortly after SharePoint Server 2010 was released around May, 2010.

First, let’s take a quick recap on the current offerings.

 

For IT Pros, this is available today:image

10174 is the entry-level training, and 10231 is a more high level approach to designing SharePoint platforms. They are both excellent in terms of real life content and labs.

For developers, this is available today:image

These follow a similar pattern to the IT Pro training: 10175 is the entry-level training and 10232 is less hands-on, more design-focused.

Out of these four trainings, the one with the most content and depth is definitely 10175 for developers. After that comes 10174 for IT Pro’s. If you are serious about SharePoint, complete all 4 trainings and then complete all 4 certification exams that accompany them:

Certification exams for IT Pro’s

  • MCTS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Configuring: Exam 70-667 (skills measured, preparation materials)
  • PRO: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator: Exam 70-668 (skills measured, preparation materials)

Certification exams for developers

  • MCTS: SharePoint 2010 Application Development: Exam 70-573 (skills measured, preparation materials)
  • PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications: Exam 70-576 (skills measured, preparation materials)

Updates

The first one to receive a well-deserved update is 10174 Configuring and Administering SharePoint 2010. The updated course introduction page lists the following changes:

  • SharePoint Online and Office 365 module added
    • Introduces Office 365 and SharePoint Online
    • Provisioning Office 365
    • Administering SharePoint Online

Time required to deliver the course has not changed – still 5 workdays. We’ve been delivering this training over a period of 3 days, or sometimes 4 days: Friday through Wednesday. A consecutive five day training tends to be too much for a lot of people, and leaves little time to reflect and try out new things.

The addition is still welcomed, though. Office 365 and especially SharePoint Online are critical pieces of the productivity platform, and it’s great to see some technical content being added to the traditional course materials.

The updated content touches upon the most important topics, such as sandbox solutions, setting up vanity domains, setting up a public-facing web site and a brief overview on setting up single sign-on with Office 365.

The material is currently in beta, and available for download for MCT’s. To get your hands on the latest and greatest of the training material if you are not a Microsoft Certified Trainer, attend a local or remote delivery of the 10174 training.

It’s 2012–ditch the PST!

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Where's my mail?This article on the Exchange Team blog introduces the PST Capture tool, that was designed to help you get rid of PST files. It’s an interesting read, since apparently lots of people are still using PST files for archiving and sorting email. It’s 2012 – ditch the PST!

I took a moment to reflect back to a time when I had to use PST-files. That was years ago. I feel old now. Perhaps my mailbox was capped to 500 MB and after careful optimization I was able to live my chained-to-email life just barely under the limit. The obvious solution was to create additional PST-files on your local drive and shuffle emails back and forth between different repositories when necessary.

Backups were always painful. Copying 10 PST files, each 2 GB in size, took ages. Or that’s how it seems when you are forced to reorganize email for artificial reasons. Thank you, 500 MB quota.

With the advent of practically unlimited email storage from Google (Gmail), Microsoft (Hotmail) and others, it’s amazing how many companies are still offering email services with subpar storage and archival options for their employees. Who, in a way, are kind of paying for those services in exchange for their time and skills.

Microsoft Exchange 2010 has supported personal archives for quite some time now. Even the TechNet article states the reason for personal archives: “[..] eliminating the need for personal store (.pst) files”. Sadly it’s a premium feature requiring an Exchange enterprise Client Access License (CAL). The alternative for this would be to employ unlimited archive from the cloud with Office 365 by using Exchange Online Archiving.

I, for one, feel that archiving and indexing old emails is worth the effort. I find myself performing advanced search queries against my pre-2000 era emails several times a month. Searching emails from Sent Items is a daily occurrence, and every too often the email I thought I sent just yesterday was actually sent 2 months ago. This is also a painful reminder on how reliant we seem to be on email. Especially for archiving purposes: stuff is sent over the wire and then forgotten – but I’ve got a copy in my archive.

So, really – ditch the PST. Give your people unlimited email archive, today. There’s no reason not to.

Office 365 update scheduled for October 20, 2011

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I’m currently using Office 365 in a hybrid environment with federation enabled on my Office 365 E3-plan. Being the technical contact for the service, I just received an email outlining the future Office 365 update.

The update is scheduled to begin from October 20, and it will continue through the end of November. We are also promised to receive a notification email 24 to 48 hours prior to our specific update window, which is really great.

The email also outlines the updates we’ll be receiving – simply said, this is exciting. Not only do we finally get Business Connectivity Services for integrating LOB-data to SharePoint Online, but we also get Windows Live ID-support for “external sharing” and official support for Windows Phone 7 Mango! External sharing, to my understanding, allows partial extranet-scenarios for company project sites and similar needs.

Also, as a long time Google Chrome user it’s nice to get official support.

Full list from the email:

  • Business Connectivity Services (BCS) (E-plans only)
  • External Sharing: Windows LiveID support
  • Windows Phone 7 "Mango" (official support and http:// –support)
  • Recycle Bin: deleted site self-recovery
  • Browser support: Internet Explorer 9
  • Browser support: Chrome

I’ll post details on using BCS when the update has deployed.